I was just wondering if we can get that post in the retro sub section removed about that !!! warning virus !!! crap. My stupid little brother (16y.o.) is getting interested in biking these days (because of me ) so I told him about this forum (He wants to look into getting a road bike but I digress). Anyway, I leave him to look through a bit (on MY COMPUTER...he has no internet on his because my dad banned him for looking up naughty stuff) while I do some study and the moron tells me something is wrong with my computer. I asked him what he did and he said it was that !!! warning virus !!! thing. Now I might have to reformat my harddrive because of all this virus stuff he loaded on that I have no idea how to remove... ARRRGHHHH

anyway, long story short, I figure its best to remove it before it happens to someone else.

Must be something about 16 year olds, I had to re-install Windows on my PC last year after my nephew spent the holidays with us. Copped something that Norton Antivirus didn't detect. The only way I knew something was wrong was when I tried to install Spybot and it kept disappearing.

S'pose the first thing to do is look up one of the security sites and try their removal recommendations and if that fails, maybe all you will need to do is re-load Windows from scratch. (which resets all the registry entries) It's still a major PITA, but not quite as drastic as reformatting the hard-drive.

I have norton and it's up to date but although norton is a 'big name' program, it's not too good. I only have it on because my dad wanted it on.

Well it's times like these that I'm glad I used to be somewhat of a computer nerd before I discovered the real world (cycling) because I think I've removed it without having to reformat.

I had to do three online virus scans, a registry scan. I manually quarantined/deleted 15 files including some sneaky .dll files in system32 and some files in the registry. I've done some malware and spyware scanning too and removed all of those. Took me all of yesterday afternoon and this morning to do it (luckily some of those programs take time to run so I could still study). I haven't restarted my comp yet because unless you delete all the files it'll only get worse when you restart. Going to do one last check and we'll see how we go.

I DID IT!!!!!!! It seems that I've removed all of it. Something may be running very very sneakily in the background but I'll live with that. It was the thing that popped up every 3 mins telling me I had critical system errors and that I needed to buy a virus buster program to fix it that really bothered me. Oh and it hijacked my internet explorer (which I don't use often anyway) and made it go to a different homepage saying the same thing about the errors.... hahaha

I wasn't quite so successful with the virus my system was infected with, despite editing registry entries, deleting a whole heap of files and running about a million scans in safe mode, the little bugger was hiding somewhere which wasn't obvious.(I suspect it might have been hidden in IE somehow) In the end, my only option was a full re-install of Windows, which of course, meant I had to re-install every other program I was using. Took the better part of a day to do all that.

Now I run two different antivirus programs, and two different programs for detecting malware/spyware etc. I wonder how people who have limited computer knowledge manage.

I still had to investigate about this one and learn new stuff and I feel that I've got above average knowledge of computers. I would feel sorry for all those average joe people who get some of these things. Thank god for google.

I found that the trendmicro online virus scan was extremely useful. Also theres a program that i used to delete the last few hidden stuff called 'HiJackThis' which is freeware. It shows up every little place the programmers and hackers use to gain entry into computers. Only problem is it shows programs in it that you may have installed as well. but its really easy to know which ones are these. Using it i managed to find all the little hidden registry and data information that linked to the program. I recommend it if you know a little bit about computers. Anyway this is a cycling forum so back to the wide world of cycling hehe

frankly, I disable most of norton's features and protection (if you can call it that haha). It's only on there because it's my dads computer and his internet subscription. Everytime I've had a problem i can usually remove it in an hour or two. This one was a little harder but it's done now. Besides I've had this computer since 1997 and its still running good. It slow speed is compensated by its stupidly high memory. My dad loaded it up big time back when we bought it . I keep using windows because I know its operating system back to front. if i had any other I'd be back to laymens ability. When I finally save for a new computer thats when I'll do stuff differently. Won't be for a while because I'm saving for a road bike first

The topic was something like '!!! warning virus !!! fun site'
and then it just had a link to something

my brother said it went to a movie but the movie wouldn't play because you had to download the right file to play it so he installed that, and that turned out to be the culprit. It was a program called iVideoCodec but it didn't do anything except install the other stuff and just put a dumby folder in your program files directory

Anything that seems too good to be true, probably is. And that goes for purchasing a new bike or parts (and not just erotic images on the net).

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Unfortunatelly we occassionally get spammed. In order to prevent this I have implemented some security measures... though unfortunatelly, too many innocent people were being accidently pinpointed as being robots, so I relaxed it a bit. Currently I deleted around two or three dodgy user account every day or two... Unless there is a major issue with spam, this is the preferred solution (otherwise I will need to invest a bit of time to find a new solution which at the same time doesn't affect new (serious) users.

If you do see a dodgy post, you can inform me and/or the topic moderater..and we will get onto it asap.

i would be happy to contribute my IT skills in hardening this site against spam / assisting with this site or anyone elses if it is cycling related - pro-bono.

Anyone not wanting to use *nix operating systems full time and HAS intermediate computer skills should consider running a seperate "internet" operating system inside vmware.

Basically, you have a program on you computer that allows you to run another "virtual computer" within the program. You can use this "virtual computer" for surfing and accumulating crapola.

If / when the "virtual computer" gets trashed just delete it and revert back to a clean version you copied earlier! voila!

Using this technique will greatly reduce the chance of your "real / production" operating system getting trashed.

Would put a bit more info on how to do this but this is a bicycling forum an I don;t want to digress or seem like i'm attempting to sell vmware (which you can run for free by the way (vmware worsktation/server))

Will be upgrading the forum shortly. We have a few mechanisms for preventing spam but can't stop all of them. The more we do to automatically stop spam robots, the more we accidently get innocent users.

I agree that anyone with a computer should take action against virii etc etc. Or get a mac ... enough of that, lets get back to cycling.